Friday, February 20, 2009

Modern Dancers

I have mentioned that I am taking classes this spring; there are two, on German films and another on the history of drama. I should probably try to find something else to blog about (and stop using it as an excuse not to write anything), but this week provided an uncanny overlap, too interesting to ignore. The film class covered Mabuse the Gambler, Fritz Lang, 1922. The drama class covered Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, 1592. The two resonate with one another in many ways.

The odds are good that Mabuse draws on Faust, fairly explicitly. Lots of films do, especially German films. Here, the influence is less the idea of selling your soul to the devil for power than the character of Faust, updated in Mabuse himself - the slippery identity, the conjuring tricks, the illusions, the acting - as well as the power, attained through manipulation of others, and usually employed to manipulate others. There are, as well, elements of the divided self implied by Faust, and the idea of gaining power by sacrificing individuality - Lang's film plays out as if Mabuse is both Faust and his own Mephistopheles. He manipulates technology, clocks and railroads and all the rest, and those tools become the source of his power, much as Mephistopheles is the source of Faust's power. And - the source of his destruction...

But the element that linked the two works for me was more the way both Faust and Mabuse are figures of their times - and specifically, figures of modernity. I mean modernity in a broad sense - in the sense of a whole new way of living, a new conception of the world and man replacing existing ideas. Faustus is a figure of a changing time. The late 16th century was a time of profound change - it's the beginning of the modern world, really. The world changed in the 16th century - I mean that literally: the world doubled in size after 1492, and the subsequent century kept expanding it, changing everything there was to change about the world. And - the dominant cultural institution of Europe also changed, utterly, in the 16th century, with the Reformation. And that led to a remapping of the world. And to new forms of government, new ideas about the state. And all this is in addition to the almost equally profound changes of the Renaissance: the birth of humanism, of capitalism, everything that happened in the 15th century. All these changes to the world changed what it meant to be human: changes how the individual interacted with society, how people defined themselves, everything. All reflected in the play....

All of which is equally true of the early 20th century, when things changed as profoundly in half the time... During the 19th century broadly, and especially the stretch from 1875 to 1925 (say), the world, again, completely changed. Political and social and cultural changes turned the world on its ear - though the real stunner was the technological changes. It's hard to really do justice to how much changed in that period. To consider how utterly differently we relate to thew world in 1925 than 1875 (more or less). The age of exploration may have doubled the size of the known world - but the technological changes of the late 19th century changed the perceptual, experiential sense of the world even more radically. The relationship between time and space were changed (an idea I'm borrowing from Tom Gunning) - space could be eliminated; space became a function of time. By 1900 it was possible to cross vast distances in short periods of time (steam ships and trains, then cars, then airplanes...). It was possible to send messages to someone on the other side of the world, in a second. Possible to talk to them. To hear their voice, to see their picture.

All these things are reflected in Faustus and Mabuse. Marlowe's play is full of travel, Faustus traveling around the world, flying up to the heavens to study the stars, wandering around Europe; it reflects facts of the 16th century - the appearance of new foods in Europe (the scene of the duchess asking for fresh grapes, which Mephistopheles fetches from around the world reminds me of the scene in Blackadder where Sir Walter Raleigh presents Queen Elizabeth with a potato.) Political schisms and religious controversies. Even the appearance of professional theater - Faustus by the end seems more like a theatrical entrepreneur than a magician, putting on shows for the nobility... It's also a story about a man who gives up all the traditional signs of identity - family, home, state, religion - in search of power, knowledge, and his own self. He is a performer - and his identity becomes a performance...

Which is also true of Mabuse. He's a gambler and an actor - the film starts with Mabuse looking at a deck of cards with his various disguises on them (like an actors' head shots.) But he's also a figure of the media - he manipulates information, directly, indirectly (in the opening stack fixing scheme especially.) He's a master of modern technology - the phone and the railroad and clocks and stock tickers - and he is presented, in that opening sequence, especially, as a master of time itself. Everything timed to the second... He's the master of the gaze, as well - a hypnotist, which Lang presents with some fascinating editing and framing of sequences - he uses hypnosis to win at the tables, not cheating at cards: manipulating, again, the game from outside, but in. He works, somewhat surprisingly, within the systems of the modern world - he exploits the railroad timetables; he uses the fact that people trust the newspapers; he takes advantage of the timing of the closing bell at the stock market. He takes advantage of the importance of maintaining the game, when he's gambling - he depends on keeping the game going, on the idea of people paying their debts, he uses all the well learned politesse of civilized life...

And they both come to highly symbolic ends: Faustus alone begging for another hour, another minute, only to be torn to pieces by devils... and Mabuse trapped in one of his own hideouts by a machine he made to keep his minions from stealing; powerless, because the men trapped with him are all blind, and his hypnotic powers are useless; surrounded by piles of his worthless counterfeit money, and then surrounded by ghosts - no longer able to control the illusions... (all that copped from Gunning's comments on the film, more or less...) Alone and mad, both of them.